Resource leaks such as memory leaks are a huge source of customer pain and occur very frequently in released software. A resource leak is a failure to release a resource such as virtual memory that an application will never use. As resources are finite, if part of the resource is not released then additional parts of the resource must be used which causes unnecessary stress on the system and can lead to resource exhaustion. Resource exhaustion can lead to performance degradation which in turn can cause system instability.